For years I’ve been interested in the way we think about piracy and copying, both in terms of the physical world and intellectual objects. It’s something that you can’t avoid if you spend a lot of time thinking and writing about technology, and has come up time and time again for me — as a creative worker, as someone who spends a lot of time talking to technology companies, and as a consumer.

I’ll be putting some of those thoughts down in a talk on June 2 in London, as part of The Piracy Project — described as an “international publishing and exhibition project exploring the implications of book piracy and creative modes of reproduction”.

Over the course of a month or so, there will be six talks discussing various aspects of this. I’m honoured to be talking in the series, alongside the likes of James Bridle and Maria Fusco.

My subject is “The Copy Continuum” — taking a look at the way we’ve thought about ideas in the past and the way we might look at ideas in the future. I’ll be drawing on my years of reporting on these issues, and exploring the relationship between technology and culture. In particular, I’ll draw on the world of shanzhai manufacturing, which I wrote about for Wired UK last year.

The talk is at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, part of Central Saint Martins. It’s £3 to get in. See you there?